The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday on oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
All three sitting commissioners — Chairman Kristine Svinicki, along with Stephen Burns and Jeff Baran — are scheduled to appear before the panel to answer questions on NRC policy, and financial and management matters.
The NRC is a roughly $1 billion per year agency charged with regulating U.S. nuclear power and waste operations.
A 2015 NRC oversight hearing by the committee featured testimony from the NRC’s four commissioners at the time: Burns, Svinicki, Baran, and William Ostendorff. Ostendorff has since left the commission, and Svinicki in January replaced Burns as NRC chairman.
In that hearing, then-panel Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) discussed his concerns regarding the NRC, including its response to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan and what he saw as excessive budgeting in the face of the falling number of operating nuclear power plants around the nation.
Then-panel Ranking Member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) also expressed concerns about the NRC’s post-Fukushima activities and about the agency’s mission to ensure the safety of people and the environment relative to use of radioactive materials.
In 2015, the regulator initiated “Project Aim,” which is aimed at rightsizing the workforce and increasing efficiency to ensure the NRC’s size matches its workload. By early 2017 the NRC workforce had been reduced from 3,674 full-time employees to 3,481.
The agency has also implemented a number of reforms for nuclear power operations to prevent Fukushima-like nuclear meltdowns, including requiring portable cooling gear at U.S. reactors.
The upcoming hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. in Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 406.